length of time for encryption to complete

I have just broken out of vmware for some fde testing on typical hardware and had a shock. I am going time how long it take for fde on a couple of different spec laptops to give users an idea what it will take, anyway I booted my old samsung x10..

1.6ghz centrino768 ram20gb c partition on ide disk

nearly 5gb used including swap and hiberfile, basic windows xp with itunes only really and no other user data

fde on c is barely 5% through (though it is progressing) after 50 minutes

also the estimated time is bouncing wildly betweem 7,8,9 hours and some random amount of minutes

also I had the auto synch set to 1 minute from some other testing I was doing and this seemed to prevent fde from ever getting going, it said it was and the times were randomly bouncing but after 10 minutes no progress, I changed to 600 minute synch and manually synced and it's gotten going as above.

RE: length of time for encryption to complete

the samsung was top of the range in 2005 but this is what a lot of our users will still have 4200rpm 2.5" ide drives, 512ram etc.

my mistake was I assumed fde would only encrypt used space and somehow mark free space so it was encrypted when written.

anyway, the 160gb usb hdd I had connected is currently being encrypted, I didn't expect this as it is a removable device. it is even shown as a removable drive in the device properties in the EEM with selectable encryption so why would the client start encrypting it?

I was planning to select the automatically encrypt all drives fully option but will have to rethink this if the software doesn't recognise all removable devices as such sad

RE: length of time for encryption to complete

My advice here is to ignore whatever the status bar says. If you sync when 75% through, it appears to start from 0 again. However, the disk still encrypts in the expected original time. The time left is usually a reasonable indicator of how long it will take, older machines can sometimes take forever, and if you have a dead sector, the time will go wild for a while!